


never thought i'd find you here

by Tobiko



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Shade!Characters, so not really THEM but part of them
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-29
Updated: 2019-04-29
Packaged: 2020-02-09 16:06:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,806
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18641476
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tobiko/pseuds/Tobiko
Summary: Julia's Shade is torn from her and sent to the Underworld. She's scared and heartbroken, until she sees some familiar faces.





	never thought i'd find you here

Julia opened her eyes.

Or, no, she wasn’t Julia. She _needed_ Julia. She felt Julia’s absence like a great, crushing weight, immobilizing her with terror as she stared around an unfamiliar elegant hallway, her feet sinking into plush carpeting and her eyes blinking in the hazy autumn colored light. The place was warm and inviting and she would have felt cozy and safe if not for the missing _Julia_ of it, and she yelled out, “JULIA!” at the top of her lungs, frantically looking up and down the hallway and then taking off in a sprint, calling and calling Julia’s name.

It took seconds to realize who she was, what she was. She was Julia’s Shade, and she had been torn from Julia. It had been the worst agony and she had faded, faded, until she was here, standing in an unknown hallway with no sign of Julia anywhere. She moaned terror and kept running, passing rooms with kids and knowing in her deepest being that Julia wasn’t there, that she wasn’t anywhere, anywhere at all.

She sobbed and kept yelling Julia’s name, and none of the kids seemed phased at all by her, continuing about their business in every room she passed, not a single head peeking out to look. She stopped in a doorway and leaned against it, tired but not, because she doubted she could feel tired in a physical sense but every bit of her ached and ached with the loss of Julia.

She looked into the room, breathing ragged and unsteady, and her eyes landed on a boy of about ten with a mop of brown hair falling into his face as he stared at what he was doing, tricky, nimble fingers manipulating a coin until it vanished, and she gasped. “Quentin?”

It had to be, it looked just like how she remembered him, and Quentin looked up at her with those familiar brown eyes wide, perfect round cheeks and hair in his eyes and stared. Julia’s Shade started to doubt it was him, the way he looked at her without recognition, until suddenly his eyes lit up and he half tumbled from his seat as he ran to her. “Julia!”

Julia’s Shade wanted to correct him, explain she wasn’t Julia, Julia was missing, she had to _find_ her, but he hugged her and she felt for a single moment okay again, not whole but like things would be alright. In that moment she realized this was not Quentin, either, in just the same way. This was Quentin’s Shade, but addressing him as such felt like more bother than it was worth. She decided to just call him Quentin and, for the moment, accept the name of Julia. She was, after all, such a very crucial part of Julia.

“Quentin what are you doing here? Is he okay? I don’t know where Julia is, I have to find her, I don’t know what to do.”

Quentin pulled back from her and smiled. “It’s okay, Julia, come sit.”

Julia’s Shade did not like that suggestion at all, she had to go find Julia, but she followed Quentin obligingly and sat with him on the big couch he had been sitting on as he did his magic trick. “Where are we?”

“This is Persephone’s house. We’re in the Underworld, the place where the Shades go,” Quentin explained. “After we lost our people Persephone gathered us up and kept us safe here, and we make little miracles. See?” He picked up another coin from out of thin air and, concentrating, made it disappear. “I sent it to a three year old. His ice cream fell but he’s going to find that coin and it’ll help him stop crying." 

“That’s nice,” Julia murmured, but she was hardly focusing on what he was saying. The pain of losing Julia was too great. “So how do we get back?”

“Oh, we don’t get back. I’m sorry, Julia, but we’re here now.”

“NO!” Julia leapt to her feet. “No, I don’t accept that! I have to get to her, she needs me!”

Quentin’s smile was sad. “I know she does. I’m so sorry. We can’t leave. There’s no way for us to. I tried, but it’s too late now for me. My Quentin couldn’t take me back even if he tried.”

“But that can’t be right!! You were fine when I saw you last, at the bank heist!”

“Bank heist? Oh, no. I’m from a different timeline than yours, you see. I’m…” Quentin paused, he thought for a moment. “… I don’t remember… I think it was twenty something.”

“You don’t remember?” Julia felt a sudden spike of fear. The way he’d looked at her, and now this. “Quentin… don’t you know who you are?”

Quentin shrugged. “It stops mattering, after a while. I can’t go back to him, and that hurt for a long time. But the hole in him closed up, and now I’m less him every day. I’ll forget what it was to be a person’s Shade just like all the other Shades here, and I’ll keep making miracles.”

“Oh no, oh god.” Julia put her head in her hands. “No, I won’t forget, I can’t forget I can’t! She NEEDS ME!” 

“I know, I know,” Quentin soothed, and he put an arm around her shaking shoulders. “It will be okay, I promise, Jules.”

“Julia?”

Julia looked up from where she had burrowed into Quentin’s embrace. A blonde, bespectacled girl stood in the doorway. Julia didn’t recognize her at all, but as the moments passed recognition of her dawned even if her physical features were still a stranger to her. This was Alice’s Shade. “Alice!”

Alice smiled bewilderment. “Julia 40, right? You must be. I’m Alice 40.”

“Forty… from the fortieth timeline, I understand,” Julia nodded her head.

Alice looked at Quentin. “He… remembers you?”

Julia looked to Quentin, who was smiling serenely at her. “Yeah?”

“Oh.” Alice frowned a little. “He doesn’t remember me most of the time. Sometimes… but he doesn’t even respond to his name, mostly.”

Julia felt mounting horror. Quentin’s expression hadn’t changed when Alice had said that and Julia realized that he didn’t care. He didn’t care that he didn’t know who he was, who he had belonged to. “Oh, Q,” Julia whispered, hugging him tight.

“It’s okay, I don’t have to remember. It’s not my job.”

“He must have been so lost without you.”

Alice came to sit next to Julia. “He managed to tell me a bit. He was from timeline 23. When he remembered who I was he gave me a big hug, said he missed me. But mostly he just acts like every other Shade here. Same with the others.”

“Others?” Julia asked. Quentin had pulled away and was making another miracle, not listening to them.

“There are others. Another Quentin, he’s more far gone than this one, doesn’t know anything at all about who he was. Some Eliots, a Margo, a you, another me, even. One of the Eliots, he’s from a more recent timeline, timeline 31, so he’s more present than Quentin is. He told me he hung out with Quentin until it got too hard. I haven’t seen him in a while, I think he’s hiding from me. Either that, or he’s gone into one of the deeper rooms.”

Julia clenched her hands. This was all too much. There was another Julia Shade? Another Julia had lost her Shade. The horror of it.

“None of them will come looking with me for a way out. But we have to get back to them, Julia. They’ll need our help.” Alice frowned. “What happened? You were okay when I saw you last.”

“Julia lost me when she was having an abortion,” Julia explained. 

“An abortion?” Alice looked alarmed. “You were pregnant? How long have I been-”

“It was Reynard’s.”

“Oh.” Alice’s face fell. Then, in an act that Julia was sure a whole Alice would not have dared to do, Alice reached over and hugged Julia tightly. “I’m so sorry that happened to you, Julia. It’s horrible. I understand why you did what you did with Martin and the knife, I only wish you’d been able to talk to us.”

Julia folded into the embrace. No, it wasn’t a moment she ever foresaw complete Julia and complete Alice having. But this was Julia and Alice’s Shades, not all of them. This was their love and empathy and understanding boiled down, and Alice’s Shade could look at Julia’s Shade differently, give her a hug and say “I’m so sorry that happened.” It was something Julia’s Shade wished that Julia could get. Maybe someday she would.

Alice pulled away. “You’ll help me, right? You’ll help me find a way out so we can get to ourselves?”

“Of course,” Julia promised. The Shades beamed at one another. Julia turned to look at Quentin. “Can I say goodbye? We’ll be working hard, I don’t think we’ll see him again unless…” _Unless we forget, too._

“You’re right. Please, do. I’ve said goodbye to him so many times.” Alice looked at Quentin sadly. Quentin was still ignoring them, engrossed in his miracles.

“Q?”

Quentin finally looked up and he smiled easily at her. “Julia,” he said, as if he’d forgotten she was there. 

Julia hugged him and he hugged her back. “I love you, Q. Thank you for being the first face I saw here. I wish we could help you get back to Quentin.” 

“That’s okay,” Quentin said. “Are you going, now?”

“Yes. We’re going to go find our way home.”

Quentin stared, then nodded. “I hope you do.”

Julia started to go with Alice. Just before turning away, Quentin said, “I’m sorry I couldn’t help more with the monster.”

Julia paused. “What?”

“The monster who killed your friends.”

Julia turned back fully, eyes huge in her face. “What… Reynard?”

Quentin smiled at her, his eyes slightly vacant but still loving. “I gave you the _biggest_ miracle I could. I gave you a second.”

“A second,” Julia repeated back, lost and completely confused.

“A whole second. A _sure_ second. I was kind of hoping you’d use it to run, but instead you used it to save your curly haired friend under our table.”

“You mean when I stepped in front of Kady?”

Quentin nodded. “You would have done something anyway. That’s just who you are. But _sure_ seconds are rare, and I gave you one so that when you moved you’d know you were doing what you needed to do.”

Julia looked at Quentin, at the shadow of all of Quentin’s love and goodness. She leaned down and kissed his cheek. “Thank you, Q.”

Quentin smiled, then turned to look down at the ladybugs in his hands as he sent them off one by one.

Julia turned to Alice. “Let’s go.”


End file.
